The Guyana Elections Commission will be spending GUY$6 million to post registered letters to 59,000 persons, who have not collected their National Identification Cards, urging them to do so.

An official of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) said the registered mail will be dispatched early in the New Year.

The letters, which will be signed by Chief Elections Officer, Gocool Boodhoo, will be sent to the various registration centres for the names and addresses of the registrants to be included. The letters will then be taken to the nearest post office for dispatch. Elections Commissioner, Robert Williams told a public meeting organised by the Faith Harding PNCR Presidential Candidacy campaign that 20,000 of the uncollected cards are for persons in Georgetown.

Seven months ago, the number of uncollected cards had stood at 90,000. That means that 31,000 cards have been collected to date.

And with just one day left before this cycle of continuous registration comes to an end, the commission reported that the response has been “slothful.”

“It’s slothful to such an extent that we had to go to schools to register children and that was satisfactory,” the official told demerarawaves.com

The penalty for adults failing to register or failing to have their children register is GUY$16,000 fine and six months imprisonment.

Commissioner Williams hinted that very soon GECOM could announce that all previously issued ID cards, other than the 10-digit ones issued in 2008, would no longer be valid.

However, a GECOM source told demerarawaves.com that such a move could affect thousands of people who do not have the only two acceptable source-documents-- birth certificates or passports---to register for national identification cards.

Back in 2006, for Georgetown alone, there were 106,000 people on the voters’ list compared to 82,000 people at the end of the 2008 registration.

“Wheh de rest gaan?.... Ovaseez? Deh gaan ovaseez, deh ded or deh refuse to registah?,” he asked the gathering at the Square of the Revolution.

“Please understand the seriousness… You cannot want improvements and stay home and don’t have an ID card,” said Williams in a subtle campaign for people to get their cards to go and vote for an alternative government.

Williams is Georgetown’s Deputy Mayor and a former Minister of Fisheries in the Forbes Burnham-led Peoples National Congress (PNC) administration.

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